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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Post-holiday “The stupid, it burns,” part 1: Jenny McCarthy

I know, I know. Picking on Jenny McCarthy over her now frequent idiotic statements about autism and her parroting of the myth that vaccines cause autism is like shooting fish in a barrel, boxing a one-armed opponent, playing tennis with a blind man (like the infamous Saturday Night Live sketch from so long ago, in […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

America the “overvaccinated”?

He’s baaack. Yes, that radio voice of the mercury militia, the shock jock Don Imus, who was so ignominiously booted from his nationwide syndicated radio show last spring is coming back to the airwaves on December 3 on WABC radio in New York, with plans to syndicate him again nationwide. Personally, although I consider Imus […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Chiropractors as physical therapists with delusions of grandeur

In the past, I’ve characterized chiropractors, at least the ones who claim to be able to treat anything other than back pain, as “physical therapists with delusions of grandeur who don’t know their limitations.” It appears that Panda Bear, MD agrees with me, and he’s particularly disturbed about such chiropractors increasingly targeting the pediatric population: […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Prince George’s County Courthouse protest about vaccine scofflaws: More there than meets the eye?

There’s a rather interesting bit of vaccine politics going on in Prince George’s County, Maryland being reported by the AP and The Baltimore Sun: Scores of grumbling parents facing a threat of jail lined up at a courthouse today to either prove that their school-age kids already had their required vaccinations or see that the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

I fought the woo, and the woo won? Or: Gotta have more woo in my medical school, revisited

Over the last couple of days, I’ve discussed “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) in terms of a meme upon which evolutionary forces are acting to select certain forms of woo over others in academia. Although, in my usual inimitable fashion, I probably carried the concept one step too far, in the end I concluded that […]